Do we attribute our own opinions to the dead?

Thinking about people who have passed away is part of the human experience. We often wonder what a parent, grandparent, or deceased friend would think about a particular decision or event. But to what extent do these imagined responses truly reflect the person who has died rather than our own views? This question inspired a study examining how living people infer what deceased individuals might think about new topics and situations.

A team of researchers, André Mata, Francisco Cruz, and Rosário Ferreira, from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Lisbon, conducted two studies involving a total of 300 Portuguese participants. The researchers asked participants to think of a deceased person who had been close to them. They were then exposed to either favourable or unfavourable arguments about a particular topic, influencing how they thought about that issue. After reporting their own opinion, participants were asked to indicate what they believed the deceased person’s opinion would be on the same topic. The researchers then examined the extent to which the opinions attributed to the deceased were associated with the participants’ own opinions.

The results showed that participants’ opinions were related to the opinions they attributed to deceased individuals. When participants came to view a topic more favourably or unfavourably, they also tended to believe that the deceased person would share that position. The researchers also found that this effect was influenced by the participant’s emotional connection to the deceased. The greater the affection or importance attached to that person, the stronger the tendency to attribute similar opinions to them. In contrast, factors such as religiosity, belief in an afterlife, and current mood did not show a significant influence on this process.

The findings suggest that when people try to infer what their deceased loved ones would think about new issues or contemporary situations, they do not rely solely on memories of the past but may also be influenced by their own opinions and beliefs. Furthermore, the results indicate that mental representations of the dead may be more flexible and context-sensitive than previous research had suggested. Nevertheless, the authors caution that the study cannot determine the extent to which participants were projecting their own opinions or simply recalling genuine characteristics of the deceased person. Further research is needed to compare how we think about the living and the dead and to identify other factors that may influence these inferences.

This study forms part of project 316/20 - The Psychology of the Living and the Dead: Interpersonal Psychology in the Afterlife, funded by the Bial Foundation. The findings were published in the journal European Journal of Social Psychology in the article What Would Grandma Think? Social Projection Onto Dead People.

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the mental states and processes of the living influence how they think of the dead. In two studies (N = 300), we manipulated participants’ attitudes towards certain topics and tested whether they projected their attitudes onto the minds of dead people they knew. Indeed, participants who were prompted to think favourably or unfavourably about a certain topic imagined that the other (dead) person would share their attitude. Implications are discussed in terms of how people use similar social cognition tools to think about the living and the dead and of how people's mental representations of the dead are malleable and sensitive to context. Finally, possibilities are laid out for further research on the social psychology of thinking about dead people.